A Man At Work: The Restaurant Kitchen Expediter

THE EXPEDITER: A Thorough Job Description Of The Heart of the Restaurant Business

by Alejandro Betancourt

Alejandro Betancourt as Chef for Tiffany's Catering in Syracuse, NY

Restaurants cannot operate properly without the middleman who exists between the kitchen and the dining room.
His name is Expeditor.

This is the lay definition to fellow diners and kitchen crew members who don’t know who I am talking about:

Expeditor: The gatekeeper in the window who yells at the kitchen, while getting yelled at by servers; then yells at the servers, continues to yell at the kitchen; and is otherwise in a deep spell driven to a super speed by perfection and timing to push the perfect plate of food out to your table.

To the individual preparing to take on this job, I have a program to follow that may change your life:

I am going to start with the short list of what it takes to expedite. Then, I will describe in more detail how to excel at managing this crucial aspect of the restaurant business.

The short list:

1. Proper Introduction: You must be introduced by owners, kitchen manager, and any other restaurant figures of authority as the new expeditor. Your kitchen staff will have attitude, and they need to respect and to trust you from the start as their leader.

2. Speed: No matter what your experience is, you must quickly learn the kitchen’s set up, the system’s tickets, and the handling of all menu items.

3. Organization: you must keep your tickets and plates organized by tables or any other logical system.

4. Demands: you must succeed at always getting what you want.

5. Communication: you must find the language that works best to express your demands without any concern for the discomfort it causes anyone.

The Push:

You are in control of the product. You must understand an order as it is printed on a ticket and expect it at a certain time.
Your copy of the ticket has four crucial items to read in this order of importance:
1. dine in or take out
2. menu items
3. time on the ticket
4. table number or order name

Dine in or Take Out
Number 1 may not apply much to your kitchen. If so, you are a blessed expeditor because many restaurants depend heavily on take out and dine in items during peak times, and organizing both is a lot of extra work. Depending on your food containers, the kitchen may give you these items wrapped and contained in a way that you can’t inspect them. You must use a language with the kitchen where items are verbally called or marked clearly. You need to know exactly which item it is and for which ticket. It is your job to remind the kitchen of any extra sides or modifications for every take out item before it is packaged and sent out.
It is a good practice to mark off or delete take out and dine in items from large orders as they are handed to you. When the order is completed, request the kitchen’s copy of the ticket or enforce a system where the kitchen’s copy is deleted to avoid duplicate items or any possible confusion.
If the kitchen makes a mistake and hands you a take out item that should be a dine in item (or vice versa), send it back immediately and have them correct the mistake.
If you inspect quickly and find any mistakes in any items, hand them back to the line and have them correct it on the fly.

Menu Items
Number 2 always applies to you and excites you too, because as soon as you read a ticket item, you envision the sight, smell, and taste of whatever menu item is about to fire from your window. You must identify each item as it is named on the menu and abbreviated on the ticket. You must know all of the ingredients in all of the items and how they are presented. You must also know the time that it takes to prepare each item. When you read the ticket, it is good practice to call out any items that require lengthy prep time or special preparation.
When you receive the item, inspect it for presentation and ingredients. If necessary, taste it. The item must match the item on the ticket you are looking at. Be very careful to look for modifications and special preparations, including sauces and ingredients on the side.

Ticket Time & Table Number
Number 3, the ticket time, must be read and organized with Number 4, the table number. They belong together because you will be sure that your entire table is served the proper courses at the same time.
Organize your tickets by table numbers by pinning the ticket directly near the counter space that you make available for all of your table’s plates.
Pay attention to the cooking line and anticipate the items that you will soon be given. If you are working in courses, prepare to move easier plates such as cold salads out the window, to your server’s hands, as they are handed to you after a quick but sharp inspection.
Ticket time becomes most important with hot appetizers and all courses considered entrees for the table. Memorize cooking times for all items and anticipate which items will be handed first, and which items will follow. When you collect half of your table’s hot items, call out for the status of any following items, especially those with longer prep times.
You will be given items for several tables at the same time. It is your job to organize these items according to their tables. It is your job to watch the time on each ticket and anticipate which table will be served first.
If you are given an item that exists on more than one ticket, ask the line to tell you which ticket the item is for. The line should be keeping track of each ticket, each item that they give you and items that will take longer time to prepare.
If a ticket is near completion, call out for the status of any remaining items. If they are on their way, begin firing them out your window to your server, and make sure your server knows which table to serve.
If they are not on the way, check the ticket time and call out to the kitchen to also check the ticket time for items that you are expecting. Tell them to make the items that you need according to ticket times and tables that are very near ready to serve. If an item is still taking too long and you need it to complete service for the rest of a table whose hot plates are beginning to cool, demand that it is made on the fly.

The kitchen is a machine with very specialized parts made of people who should stay focused on one or a limited amount of stations during service.
Exploded, each individual will hardly complete a plate. Together, they produce meals for hundreds.
During peak times, the individuals in your kitchen machine will not slow down the pace. If you allow a ticket to go through, they will work on it.
It is your job to pace the kitchen, and pace yourself.
When you hear tickets coming in, there is no doubt in your mind that you will read that ticket soon. But you must not allow the flow of tickets to overwhelm anyone. If you are working at maximum capacity, it is your job to complete orders before you allow the kitchen to begin working on new ones.
When you know that most of your items are on their way, send tickets through and allow your kitchen to stay on pace and on time.

At peak times, it is good practice to ask for assistance with dine in sides and take out packaging. But you must not surrender control of your position. As a leader, you must call out to your assistant which item to help you with and for which ticket.
Tickets will almost always be organized by time. But smaller tables will be completed before larger ones.
If necessary, help your assistant identify where you need help by calling out a description of the order, such as “large table with steak special.”
Maintain control of tickets as they come in, counter space as you organize it, kitchen and window as you push out dine ins and take outs, and pace of service.

It is your job to call for any sides and garnishes that you are running low on. As service slows down, it is your job to replenish or 86 any item.

You will not need assistance as service slows down, and you will begin to close your station.
Keep your kitchen well-paced until the last ticket is completed. Always regard ticket time and always inspect every item that you push out the window.

Mr. Runner Up - Series on Male Body Image.4.

"Mr. Runner Up" is a series of images and short essays about male body image and male pageantry.

Image by Alejandro Betancourt

Words edited by Alejandro Betancourt from menstuff.org:

http://www.menstuff.org/issues/byissue/bodyimage.html

Excerpts from: Body Image Problems Not Just in Women

"Millions of boys and men today harbor a secret obsession about their looks and are endangering their health by engaging in excessive exercise, bingeing and purging rituals, steroid abuse, and overuse of nutritional and dietary [products]."

Those at particular risk: men who constantly seek instant results from workouts and frequently check their progress in mirrors or on scales.

 - Katherine A. Beals, PhD, Ball State University, RD; from March/April issue of ACSM's Health & Fitness Journal, published by the American College of Sports Medicine.

Therapists report seeing 50% more men for evaluation and treatment for eating disorders than they did in the 1990s.

And the root of this trend may be a new type of disorder -- an obsession for six-pack abs and bulging biceps that seems especially common in athletes and other fitness enthusiasts.

Though statistics show that about 10% of men suffer from the two best-known eating disorders -- anorexia and bulimia -- a growing body of evidence suggests that men may be especially vulnerable to muscle dysmorphia, a condition in which one obsesses about lacking muscle definition and mass, even with a muscular body.

-British Medical Journal

"As far as we know, all men are prone to these types of issues…The reasons why haven't been well studied, but one factor may be the availability of anabolic steroids, which are potentially dangerous but can make men become much more muscular than Mother Nature ever intended."

"Perhaps this is the one domain left where men can feel like men, since women can do everything that men can do, except they can't bench-press hundreds of pounds," Phillips tells WebMD.

"What has happened over the years is there's an increasing emphasis on men's appearance, and in particular on looking muscular, and it coincides very nicely with the increasing equality women have attained in society."

- Katharine Phillips, MD, director of the Body Image Program at Brown University's Butler Hospital and author of several books on men's body image problems, including The Adonis Complex: The Secret Crisis of Male Body Obsession.

Even boys and teens -- especially those who are overweight -- are suffering emotional trauma in their quest for bigger muscles, and setting themselves for possible future medical problems. "They may try to eat lot of protein but limit fat, and they often develop a fear of foods and an anxiety that results from restrictive eating," Loomis tells WebMD.

- Catherine Loomis, PhD, psychologist at the Eating Disorders Center at Rogers Memorial Hospital in Oconomowoc, Wis., one of the nation's few treatment centers that specifically treats men with eating disorder and body image problems.

Sources: By Sid Kirchheimer. ACSM's Health & Fitness Journal, March/April 2003. British Medical Journal, Nov. 3, 2001. Anorexia Nervosa and Related Eating Disorders, Inc. Katharine Phillips, MD, director, Body Image Program, Butler Hospital; associate professor of psychiatry, Brown University, Providence, R.I. Catherine Loomis, PhD, psychologist, Eating Disorders Center, Rogers Memorial Hospital, Oconomowoc, Wis. Roberto Olivardia, PhD, clinical instructor of psychology, McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School, Boston. aolsvc.health.webmd.aol.com/content/article/62/71549.html

Mr. Runner Up - Series on Male Body Image.3.

"Mr. Runner Up" is a series of images and short essays about male body image and male pageantry.

Image and Words By Alejandro Betancourt

In the year 2007, I became a bachelor again and I decided to get real lean. I wanted to look like a Greyhound. I thought of the lean build of a Doberman Pincher.

I thought of those dogs in my mind every morning and woke up to a running course that included a track on the top of a hill. To get to the top I ran 150 uneven brick steps. At the track, I ran 5 laps and did 100 crunches. When I returned to the bottom of the hill I did it all over again.

It didn’t take long to change my body shape and not only look lean, but also feel mentally and physically faster. My diet consisted mostly of beer and bachelor snacks. My attitude became overly aggressive and careless of others.

I wanted to show myself off, like some show dog. I shaved my head and wore muscle shirts when I went out. My dates were young and cute. I got laid all the time.

In 2008, I modeled for Syracuse University’s art department and gained access to one of the best gyms I have ever been privileged to use. I began lifting weights and eating a lot. I became meaner looking and thought of Rottweilers. My arms got huge and I stopped messing with little dates.

Soon I set a goal to leave Syracuse and return to LA. That is where I am now.

Mr. Runner Up - Series on Male Body Image.1.

"Mr. Runner Up" is a series of images and short essays about male body image and male pageantry.

Image and Words By Alejandro Betancourt

I used to tuck in my white uniform shirt into my fat husky gray chords and pull my belt tight at the waist, then pull my shirt out just right so it made me look boxy. I was a fat kid, but smart enough to try a stocky look.

Like an illusionist, the fat spare around my mid-section would disappear, but the tight belt was painful and left scarring. The pain was worth it as a 10-year-old boy who only began to learn the rules of the image game.

I began to gag myself after dinner and throw up in the toilet to lose weight. My mother worked as a maid and I worried that she would catch me, so I tried to keep it quiet and clean.

But one of my mother’s clients was bulimic, and she knew about places to clean that I did not. The splatter under the rim gave me away and I was busted.

Throughout my youth, I occasionally threw up when I felt fat until I discovered the gym and began to work out on my own. Sports were not always an option, but that was ok. I thought the sport of looking good had better rewards.

Mr. Runner Up - Series on Male Body Image.1.

"Mr. Runner Up" is a series of images and short essays about male body image and male pageantry.

Image and Words By Alejandro Betancourt

The mattress was on the floor with pizza boxes and empty 2-liters of soda, ash trays, candy wrappers, little empty baggies and straws next to his bedside.

When he was skinny, he bought nice furniture and antique Japanese ox blood vases. Fresh flowers from the flower market filled them at 4 am, and a new orchid was added to his collection.

He used to take care of everything that he owned and polish up his body, his face, and his hair before he chose slim pants and a shirt that made him look like a stylish young man of distinction.

When he got fat, the poor guy just turned into a slob. He said he weighed around 230, but he looked heavier than that. At least 250. I never humiliated him by asking.

Even during our worst fights, I tried not to call him fat. Before that, I remember we had a mild argument, and when I did so, he quietly said, “Don’t call me that, it hurts my feelings.”

We were just kids and it didn’t work out. In the end I lost all respect for him and called him a fatass all the time.   

CONFIDE - Secrets Men Tell: Hugo Acosta

TELLING THE NEWS

Hugo Acosta, owner of CNY Latino newspapers http://www.cnylatino.com/

Hugo Acosta is the first man I photographed for the Confide essays. At the time, he was the most popular Latino in Syracuse, NY. This short, energetic Venezuelan runs the largest Latino newspaper in Central New York while owning a computer consultation business, attending to his family, and representing the Latino community in almost every public function. 

CNY Latino media was expanding into a larger group in 2008, when I left Syracuse. At that time, he was beginning a radio broadcast and beefing up his website. I was already writing for him, and would have begun a bilingual broadcast for his radio show if I hadn't left.

Hugo answered the phone when I first picked up a copy of CNY Latino and called for information about contributing stories. I had prior bilingual writing experience, but he didn't care about that as much as he cared about meeting more Latinos in Syracuse. It was something we both had in common. We both used a professional edge to meet Latinos and create a better community for ourselves.

We met and had lunch at the only authentic Mexican restaurant in town called El Canelo. Neither of us knew what that name meant, and we were both curious enough to ask the waiter, who told us that Canelo was the name of someone's horse. So we laughed and began to really talk about getting in touch with the Latinos in town. Like him, I wanted to get to know them and their place among so many predominately white people.

Today, Syracuse still appears as a young city that is in need of development. Its downtown area of reference is full of empty buildings. It has been that way since 2004, when my former boss, Eli Hadad, bought at least half a dozen downtown skyrises and then simply stopped developing them. He just left town, owing taxes, and leaving buildings such as the historic Hotel Syracuse non-operative because of leins on the property.

However, the Hotel Syracuse's elaborate banquet halls functioned, and Hugo danced there in a public fundraiser called "Dancing With Our Stars." He is a star; and naturally displays charisma and engages you and the audience when he speaks.

I sat with him during one of his live radio shows on the Wednesday night before a Thanksgiving. The show ran from eight to ten pm on station WVOA, 98.3 FM. This was a public station with Christian programming that allowed him a time slot. The shows he recorded there were going to sell to ClearChannel. 

WVOA operated in a trailer North-East of Syracuse. It was full of old equipment that was outfitted just enough to simply work with anything new. Hugo was working with his voice, music cds he burned, and more cds with recorded data. His show was called CNY Latino, and he broadcast live while only referring to some notes and a rough outline.

It looked easy to me. I sat in for a half an hour that night before I received some very bad news. A friend of mine who agreed to let me move into his apartment withdrew the offer a day before the holiday. I told Hugo the news, and we gave each other the "now what?" look.

It was heavy news for me, but telling him made things easier because of that quick look of understanding, followed by his get-back-to-business attitude. He knew I would survive, anything was possible; after all we were broadcasting out of a trailer in the middle of nowhere in the snow the day before Thanksgiving.

From the beginning of our friendship, Hugo always came across as a man with a cause who I could have a solid conversation with. Our emails were brief, but our face to face meetings always went on for a long time because to me, he was a real talker and thinker who would repeatedly put his ideas into action. We shared the ambition to develop the Latino community in Syracuse by all means possible, and we both had the ability to connect to a wide variety of personalities.

I left Syracuse in December of 2008, but remained connected to Hugo and the paper. For the December issue of CNY Latino, I decided to submit something very personal for his readers. It was a letter that my mother wrote to me earlier that year, where she spoke to me about dealing with abuse while she was pregnant with me, self-help therapy, forgiveness, and  the importance of personal growth and peace. He ran the story without any comments or changes.

CONFIDE - Secrets Men Tell: Kirby DarDar

Secret Talents

His name alone gets enough attention. Kirby DarDar: Former NFL running back for the Miami Dolphins. The Kirby DarDar KIDS WIN! Football Camp. DarDar, board member of organizations such as Syracuse University Athletics and Catholic Charities.


Kirby and I first met when I stepped into his cubicle at HSBC to discuss my first business account. I got as far as telling him that I researched grants as part of my business when our conversation and relationship took a friendlier direction.


DarDar was a good artist when he was young who never got the opportunity to develop his own abilities. He told me that he was too busy being a star athlete in his track and football days at SU. Those took him on to play pro football in Florida.


But he loved art and part of my business was art representation. A.B. Resource was my business name, and the idea was an arts agency / event planning company that had room to grow into a production company. I not only wanted to represent artists for gallery sales, but also provide them with grants opportunities and teach them how to persue that kind of funding.


And DarDar was looking for a grant writer. We got our things together and moved our meeting to an empty floor of unused administrative HSBC space. Our new meeting lasted over an hour.


Kirby not only had a love for football and kids, but of the opportunities provided through grants that NFL youth football camps could bring to the Syracuse locals. He showed me his business plan before I even got to mine.

He was linked to Catholic Charities and made a name for himself that way too, in tv and print. What he saw between he and I was such an obvious opportunity that I could not help to begin spinning my own wheels about it.


I remember telling him that I would help him with our first grant project for free, as a friend. After that, he reeled me in with a 20% cut of all grants I would ever write thereafter. It was too good to be true. Any grant worth writing would bring in two hundred easily. Three grants a week would not be a bad income for a single guy in Syracuse. 


Later I found out that none of it would be legal. But I liked hearing this guy talk to me about money in a private floor of the bank he represented. I also liked the ideas he was developing. All of this coming from the former pro player who was now sustaining his family as head of all Syracuse business accounts.


He told me that he developed the downtown courthouse himself; which was also a grants project. The courthouse was unique because it enforced community service instead of fines. It used the idea of rehabilitation over punishment.


The man had a great public conscious. Many months passed before we worked on something solid, but I always remember that spontaneous meeting and the personal things that we so easily trusted each other with.